It’s 2012. We have a black president and a robot on Mars, but we still market to searchers the same way on all devices.

Many are wary of going mobile because they’ve seen lower conversion rates or believe that they could deliver a better desktop experience. But that’s not up to the marketer to decide.

More searchers are using their mobile devices and tablets to search for your products and services. You can and should cater to that.

The key here is to deliver a solid, relevant, and high-converting experience that matches the context and device of the searcher. Here are eight tips to help you out.

Bids and Budgets

1. Separate Your Budgets

Start with the money. Separate your budgets. If you’re going to treat desktop and mobile campaigns differently, you’ll need to spend differently on them as well. A separate budget will give you much more control and allow you to turn it up or down as necessary.

2. Increase Your Bids

Start thinking about the way you bid. If you’re a visual person like me, go ahead and Google the same exact thing on your computer and phone. Notice anything? Much fewer ads show up on mobile searches, which means you’ll need to bid more aggressively on keywords.

Keywords

3. Use Fewer Keywords

Compared to desktop, keywords searched on mobile devices tend to be shorter and there are fewer distinct queries. The good news is that you can get away with having fewer keywords in your mobile campaigns. The catch? These keywords must be particularly granular and specific to ensure that your message is device specific and highly relevant to searchers.

4. Test Different Keywords

Because your keywords are likely to have a different performance on mobile devices, separating them from search and testing them can give you the insight you need in terms of what’s working for you and what needs to be tweaked.

Ads

5. Don’t Copy Your Desktop Ads

Instead, write mobile specific ones by taking search queries into account to understand searcher intent. Look for common themes in these queries to get an indication of the searcher’s behavior. For example, if their queries are no price-specific, they might be less interested in a bargain and more interested in features and benefits (and vice versa!).

Landing Pages

6. Learn How to Work with the Small Screen

Just because you’re limited in terms of screen real estate, doesn’t mean you have to compromise on user experience. There are lots of tips to help you create a mobile-optimized landing page, like:

Geo-targeting

7. Location, Location, Location!

Most searchers don’t include locations in the queries, since they assume their phone already knows where they are. So if you have any local campaigns, it’s critical that you geo-target them and show searchers that you understand both their location and intent.

Driving Traffic

8. Understand and Decide Where to Drive Traffic

Sometimes you’ll want to drive your traffic online and other times, it makes more sense to send them to, let’s say, the nearest store. You can easily figure that out based on the search queries. If you do have a physical location, here are some tips to include in your ads to make it easier for you to drive foot traffic:

Include a store locator feature, or an address at the very least.

Add maps and directions.

Use Insight to Optimize Search Across Screens

To tie it all together, here are some insights and takeaways from a retailer case study by DataPop. By monitoring user behavior and inferring searcher intent, they were able to come up with an optimization strategy to deliver a relevant, high-converting experience to searchers across multiple screens and devices.

This week, both LinkedIn and Facebook are beefing up their paid social offerings in different ways, while Google seeks to cut off Adwords revenues for fake news sites. And might Google be favouring desktop over its own AMP in its upcoming mobile-first index?

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.